Here we have an odd little artifact, a greatest hits album from a group without a single honest-to-god hit to their name, and one that only includes half of that group's still-short career. N.E.R.D. have released only four albums, and after their second one, they switched labels from Virgin to Interscope. So maybe that's why all of this so-called best-of album only includes stuff from those first two albums and completely ignores their post-2004 existence. So that's pretty weird. But even weirder is the very idea of a N.E.R.D. best-of in the first place. As the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo have had one of the all-time great runs of any pop production team, cranking out dozens of hits for tons of artists across the stylistic spectrum-- usually finding room for their own austere future-funk sensibility in the process. But N.E.R.D. is their vanity project, the one that allows them to push that sensibility toward riskier, proggier areas and removes them, at least in theory, from the pressures of the marketplace. Theoretically then, this is a group that should not have a greatest hits album.
Of course, N.E.R.D. is a way messier project than that suggests, and if these guys didn't care about making hits on their own, they wouldn't have made an awkward car commercial during last year's VMAs. The tracks on Best Of are pop songs that failed in interesting ways, by pushing the Neptunes' Triton click-thuds into punk-rock clatter and spotlighting Pharrell Williams' truly goofy sloganeering. As N.E.R.D., the Neptunes couldn't just make a great strip-club song; they had to force in all these fake-profound lines about how the real strippers are politicians and society. But at its best, this stuff worked anyway because they knew they were being absurd and because they couldn't help but make great pop songs. That strip-club song, "Lapdance", is their first single, Pharrell flexing a slithery Curtis Mayfield falsetto over cowbell-heavy strut-funk while never-seen-again white rapper Lee Harvey drops an endearingly ridiculous guest verse that I still quote when I get drunk enough: "Burnin' a flag, all in the name of white trash!"
When N.E.R.D. worked, that sort of messy collision between good and bad ideas was what made them work. They recorded their debut album, 2002's In Search Of..., twice: once on their own, once with funk-metal crew Spymob backing them up. Alas the Spymob version was the one that eventually saw American release. The Neptunes, totally on fire at the time, seemed smart enough to know that they didn't need a rock band cluttering up their arrangements; they should've been above that sort of Warped Tour pandering. But listening back to those tracks now, it's pretty remarkable how they made their spare sci-fi pop work even though all that fuzz-pedal abuse.
All the best moments on Best Of come from In Search Of... "Provider" is the rare drug-trade chronicle that admits to uncertainty and desperation, and its slick, bluesy swagger only adds to its depth. "Rock Star" gives us the irresistible spectacle of Pharrell pretending to be a Hot Topic cashier and railing against "posers", and its classic Neptunes slink makes even the overcompressed Static-X fuzz assault sound cool enough for Jay-Z to freestyle over it on the great S. Carter Collection mixtape. "Truth or Dare" is oozing, sinister dance-funk with just a hint of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult decadence working for it. In Search Of... is a sloppy and uneven piece of work, but it's a lot of fun hearing these highlights again.
In all, Best Of includes eight of In Search Of...'s 12 tracks, jumbled up and sprinkled with songs from the way-less-inspired follow-up Fly or Die. If you already have In Search Of... in your iTunes, there's no reason to seek out Best Of. If you don't, there's no reason to start with this one instead. The rare tracks here, like the Justice remix of the Fly or Die single "She Wants to Move", don't warrant more than a listen or two, and the compilers missed a golden opportunity when they opted not to include the slept-on Native Tongues remix of "She Wants to Move", which recruited rap's late-80s art-kid geniuses to rap about butts over Adam Ant-esque burundi drums and somehow made the whole thing work. And on top of that, there's just no way to compile an hour-plus N.E.R.D. comp without tossing in a few clangers, whether or not you include anything from the last two albums. So what we have hear is a fun and sometimes frustrating listen, and one that has absolutely no reason to exist.
